Cultural Divide

There was recently a good piece in the Times about Egypt. In it, Michael Slackman dissects what he perceives to be an Egyptian tendency toward patience in the face of adversity. "The [Egyptian] education system is in crisis, and unemployment, traffic and pollution area all major problems," Slackman writes, also noting that 40% of the Egyptian population lives on $2 a day. Slackman quotes Mr. Ahmed Sayed Baghali, the Egyptian on the street, who bemoaned his government's impotence to improve the country's plight. What does Mr. Baghali do to help himself, you may wonder? He waits patiently for the government to fix things. What does the government, run by Hosni Mubarek for the past 27 years, do about it? Nothing really, but Mr. Mubarek's son and heir apparent, Gamal, "counsels patience." [FN 1]

It is true that patience is a virtue. But when patience leads to stasis and eventually stagnation, it becomes a vice. For example, when I was in Egypt, I noticed that many buildings were incomplete. They were missing windows, or doors, or plumbing. The only complete buildings belonged to the government, or foreign-owned hotels and touristy places. Why? Tax loopholes - Egyptians don't have to pay taxes on incomplete properties, so they leave properties incomplete. The government hasn't closed this loophole. Why? "Maalesh," Slackman writes. "Maalesh" is Arabic for "Oh well" or "Whatever." With its companion sentiment, "Inshallah" or "God willing," these Middle Eastern concepts of "whatever will be will be" are both foreign and infuriating to Westerners. Allow me to explain.

Americans are born problem-solvers. We're not always good at solving problems (see: the Global War on Terror; the economic bailout; Katrina; etc.), but we're sure as heck going to try. For example, imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if, after 9/11, government officials collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, "Oh well." No no, we demand action when things go wrong.

This is not the case in many instances in the Middle East. When things go wrong there, the knee-jerk reaction is to wait it out. "Inshallah, things will get better." I don't know what this fatalistic acceptance of fate stems from. In his article, Slackman posits that it arises from a combination of factors. First, he says it arises from "strong religious faith and a conviction that all events are God's will." Second, it is attributable to a cultural recognition of the length of history.

There is much sense in this second factor. History literally began in the Middle East - the Fertile Crescent is in Iraq and the Pyramids still stand in downtown Cairo. These constant reminders of the timeless stretch of human history have molded the mindset of Middle Eastern culture. When one's sense of history is measured in millennia, fleeting day-to-day existence holds less importance. As a result, things like The Crusades are still a fresh wound in the minds of many Arabs.

When this long-term mindset meets the frenetic, A.D.D. Western mind, with its 24-hour news cycle and ignorance of even recent history [FN 2], the culture clash can be astounding.

How about a story to illustrate?

Give industrious Americans a tough job, and we will move mountains to see that it gets done. For example, in Iraq, my unit was put in charge of creating, training, and deploying the local police force and border patrol. Because my commander at the time was the Rock With Lips, who possessed the planning skills of your average pillowcase, that really meant that I was in charge of creating, training, and deploying the local police force.

My police training consisted entirely of watching "Law & Order" re-runs, so I was not really prepared for the job. However, lack of training, knowledge or preparation hadn't stopped Operation Iraqi Freedom up to that point, so I put together my plan. I guesstimated that we'd need 900 police officers to cover the 4 municipalities in our area. I broke that number down into different departments for each municipality, assigning personnel levels based on the size of the town. Then I broke each department down into units and assigned a command structure - chief, officers, support staff, patrolmen, etc. Then I figured we'd have to pay them, so I set up a payscale.

'Well, they'll need equipment too,' I thought. Weapons and ammo, radios, patrol vehicles, body armor, uniforms, file cabinets, desks, headquarters buildings, and record-keeping equipment were just a few things I put on my wish-list. I set up a meeting with the various mayors, and after greasing the proper palms, I got permission to use various buildings as police stations. I submitted my supply request to the chain of command, and a week later stuff started falling into my lap - 1000 Chinese-made AK-47s, crates of ammo, 20 new pickup trucks with machine gun mounts, flak vests, helmets, uniforms, rank insignia, a complete radio system with hand-held radios and building-mounted booster antennas, office supplies, boots in all sizes, sand-bags and concertina wire, and thousands of U.S. dollars in cash to start paying people. Thanks, U.S. taxpayers.

I located a set of abandoned buildings outside town to use as a training area, and I requisitioned more still more supplies to set up a police academy: desks, chairs, easels and paper for visual aids, bull-horns, marksmanship targets, notepads, pens, pencils, police-training manuals, and more. 'We'll have to feed the trainees,' I thought, so I ordered weeks worth of rations. This stuff too fell from the sky, courtesy of all you Joe the Plumbers out there.

I designed a program of study - classes on the rule of law (no corruption in this police department, no sir), checkpoint operations, marksmanship, weapons searches, emergency response operations, arrest and booking procedure, etc. Then I did what the Army calls "train the trainer." I designated those personnel from my unit - namely the best officers and NCOs - that would train the new police officers, and I taught them how to conduct the police training.

'Now we'll need some police officers,' I thought. I met with our squadron's Civil Affairs team and reserved the best translators to help conduct class (as usual, we didn't speak Arabic, and the police officers wouldn't know English). I then had the Civil Affairs team contact known former police officers or Iraqi Army officers in the area. Rationalizing that I couldn't start completely from scratch, and that I'd need someone in the police force who knew what was going on, I'd put people with prior experience in the officer positions. The Civil Affairs people gave me a list of names, many of which were known to us already as informants or at least nominal American allies. We vetted them as best we could (which wasn't very good, but what could we do?), and put them through the first round of training.

'Great, we have our police force's leadership,' I thought. Then the recruiting began. In an area where unemployment ran at something like 75%, it wasn't hard to find 850 people to sign up as police officers. Some 2500 men showed up on the first day. I had anticipated that level of turnout, and therefore had set up an obstacle course as an initial screening process. Anyone that refused to complete the obstacle course (and there were quite a few who did refuse - these individuals claimed they were the son or brother or cousin of so-and-so, and expected to get hired via nepotism) or could not complete the course (lots of them too) were told to leave. That left us with about 1200 semi-able-bodied men. We took down their names, issued them temporary photo IDs, and told them to come back the next day when we would assign them to training schedules.

We spent the night checking the new roster against known names and aliases of insurgents, thereby eliminating a few dozen more applicants. The next day we quietly arrested those individuals on the known insurgent list, and then assigned the rest to training schedules.

Training was a high-profile event. We were one of the first Army units to create a new civilian police force from scratch, and everyone in the chain of command wanted a piece of the action. I never saw so many colonels and generals as I did in those few weeks - every couple of days a helicopter full of VIPs would show up at our base and demand to be taken out to view training. They were roundly impressed, and I was ordered to write up a report on the program. The 82nd Airborne incorporated my report into their standard civilian police-training procedures.

About 9 weeks after I began, I had 4 shiny new police forces. They had everything they needed to take responsibility for their own communities. I felt that I had moved heaven and earth to get it done, and I really thought we had taken a major step in handing control of Iraq back to the Iraqis. 'There, that's how you get things done,' I thought. However, in all my planning, I had made a central error - I had not accounted for "Maalesh" and "Inshallah."

Less than a week into the new forces's operations, things started to fall apart. The new police chiefs were taking bribes from local officials and insurgents alike. "Baksheesh," they called these bribes, but Iraqis don't see it as bribery. Rather, it's more like an employment perk. For example, let's say the police chief ordered gloves for his officers from a local supplier, who charged $1000. The police chief would raise the price to $2000 and submit a request to me for the money. If I gave him the money, he'd keep $500 for himself, give $500 to the supplier (likely his cousin or brother), and the supplier would pay $1000 to the glove manufacturer.

Obviously, this is defrauding the U.S. government, which is one problem. Another is that justice was very much for sale - just as the police inflated cost in their budget requests to me, they'd sell services to the highest bidder. I almost immediately got reports of insurgents buying passage through police checkpoints set up to stop them. The police force also began "finding" stashes of insurgent weapons (they likely just bought the weapons themselves), and brought these weapons to me looking for bounties or rewards. I complemented them on a job well done, and told them to keep up the good work. The officers were more than a little peeved when I told them they don't get bounties for finding weapons caches or capturing insurgents - that's part of their job and what they were being paid to do.

Seeing that no bounties were forthcoming, the police offices basically shut down. Officers deserted and took their uniforms and weapons and radios with them. Checkpoints and patrols ceased. I confronted the chiefs and told them they had to get control of their departments. Uniformly, they responded with, "Inshallah."

"No, not God Willing," I replied, through a translator. "You willing. You have to do this. You have to take charge of your own forces. You have to protect your own citizens." They all nodded and smiled and said, again, "Inshallah." Exasperating doesn't describe the half of it. Maddening is closer.

Of course they did nothing. Insurgent attacks increased. Officers actually took bribes to allow insurgents to emplace IEDs near to police checkpoints - the better for insurgents to blow up U.S. patrols because they knew we'd come by to observe the checkpoints. Collaborating with the enemy should have been the final straw, and I should have disbanded the police force entirely, but I couldn't. Too much money and time had been put into the program, and there were too many high-profile eyes watching. I had become too big to fail.

To make matters worse, the insurgents themselves disbanded the police force. One night, 25 armed and masked men raided the central police station, and told the chief that if he and his officers didn't quit, they'd kill all of them and their families. Rather than take offense at this and fight back - if not out of pride then at least to protect their friends and families from a reign of terror - they all quit. They walked out that night, leaving the station vacant. Iraqis are excellent looters, and by the time we received the report of what happened and got out there, everything was gone - the desks, the chairs, the file cabinets, and, most disturbingly, all the weapons and ammo.

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Now what? The Rock With Lips and I went to the police chief's house. "You can't just let this happen!" we told him. "Maalesh," he told me. Oh, I wanted to strangle him on the spot.

The police force fell apart, and never really got off the ground while I was there. At best, we were able to set up a shell of the force we really needed, and they were little more than traffic cops. The American forces in the area fought the insurgency with little to no help. The lack of help was astounding, especially because soon thereafter the insurgents began putting IEDs in the marketplace and blowing up more Iraqis than Americans.

But the locals didn't help us to help them. Why? "Maalesh." "Inshallah, the insurgents will stop the attacks." Patience is a virtue, and a vice. The end.

[FN 1] The Egyptian government is good at one thing: accepting U.S. handouts. We give them about $1.3 billion a year in military aid, and about $815 million a year in humanitarian aid. As of 2004, this totaled about $50 billion dollars in U.S. largesse. Compare that to the $9.2 billion in aid to Katrina victims.

[FN 2] A 2001 study found that American high schoolers are basically ignorant. 1 in 5 students thought that Watergate occurred before 1900 and 2/3 could not place the Civil War in the correct half century. A separate study [cited in the previous link] found that 53% of high school students didn't know the meaning of "holocaust." Another survey found that a quarter of high school students thought Columbus sailed to the New World after 1750. It was in 1492, in case you forgot when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.